Paulette Childress White

Paulette Childress (born 1948), also known as Paulette Childress White, is an American writer of poetry and short fiction.

Early life Paulette Childress was born in 1948 in Hamtramck, an enclave of Detroit, Michigan. She was the third of thirteen children born to Norris and Effie Childress. She was included in the 1977 Blacksongs broadside series, and then her book The Watermelon Dress: Portrait of a Woman, a four-part narrative poem, was published in 1984. Her writing has appeared in the anthologies Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature (1979), Midnight Birds: Stories of Contemporary Black Women Writers (1980), and Mending the World: Stories of Family by Contemporary Black Writers (2003).

Themes of her work, which tends toward the autobiographical, include solidarity among women, marriage and motherhood, identity, and connections to Africa. She draws significantly on her hometown of Detroit as a setting.

Childress taught from 1987 to 1997 at Wayne State University, then at Henry Ford College, where she developed the school's first course in African American literature.

She has been honored with awards and grants from the Michigan Legislature, the Michigan Council for the Arts, and the Focus on Women Program at Henry Ford College.